I’m actually surprised that this story has not made it to the dope yet.
The Sidekick manufactured by Danger, a subsiduary of Microsoft, herein referred to as MSDanger is a data device that some have called the first smartphone. Released back in early 2000, unlike the current generation of phones at the time, was designed with text messaging , email, and aol’s internet messenger rather than voice communications.
Instead of keeping data, contacts and pictures and what not on the device, everything was stored in a primitive version of the cloud, all one had to do was to buy another device , log in and all user data would be there. With push notifications and its intergal keyboard , it developed a user base that would number up to a million with celebs and ordinary smucks alike.
I don’t own a sidekick, but I am more interested in how this could have happened. Concidering that more computing stuff is moving to the cloud , this has ramifications that will encompass many aspects of cloud computing , even if it actually is incompetence.
What I cant get my head around is the size of the back up relative to the amount of storage space. MSDanger only had one server, no mirrors and no previous backups made ? No one recognized this as a single point failure node , regardless of how it failed ?
While no one has said anything other than incompetence, I am curious if this was possibly a blackmail attempt or sabotage , frankly it would look better than what may have actually happened.
The scary thing, though? Every. Single. Place. that I’ve ever got a job as a system admin for has had at least ONE of those things (a big storage array of critical data with bad/no backups and no redundancy) sitting somewhere in the critical path for one reason or another. They tend not to have 'em when I leave, though.
Fairly good article on it. I’d agree with the analysis. It’s the same thing Microsoft did with Hotmail. Replaced perfectly good servers with their own product, it failed miserably, they had to bring their own servers back.
The difference between e-mail for a bunch of nerds and cell phone service for rich and beautiful people, mind you… well.
Makes twice as much sense if you consider the Zune Phone side of things. The new servers would have to allow for Microsoft’s Zune service, which Oracle ones would not be capable of doing, thanks to Zune’s highly entertaining integration with DRM and so on.
I don’t have a Sidekick, but I have also been following this story with interest. I personally don’t trust having my important data out there on a server somewhere, out of my control. (Although I say this as a devoted Google user with much of my most important stuff on Gmail and Google Docs!) I still feel a bit paranoid that this stuff could just disappear one day, and I do try to make backups of all my most important stuff.
So, did Sidekick users have the ability to make backup copies of their data?
That was mentioned in the article. T-Mo did have some sort of a backup utility that would sync from the cloud back to the pc, but not from the device to the pc.
I liked this tho
I wonder how soon it is before Microsoft anounces that its going to buy T-Mobile.
That being humerously mentioned, at one point does the FBI get involved. I was reading on HoFo , on the danger forum and someone mentioned that if the blackberry service goes down, it impacts national security. Now the sidekick story has nothing of that nature, but I think damages are going to be in the billions.
